BY MICHAEL KARADJIS
"Politics has never seen such a widespread liquidation operation", declared the Turkish daily Sabah following the crushing victory of the "Islamist" Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey's November 3 general election.
The AKP's absolute majority of 360 seats in the 550-seat parliament was achieved with only 34% of the vote. However, Turkey's traditional ruling-class parties — the Democratic Left Party (DLP), the Motherland Party (ANAP), the True Path Party (DYP) and the neo-fascist Nationalist Action Party (MHP) — which have corruptly dominated the political scene for decades were wiped off the electoral map. Only the social-democratic Republican Peoples Party (CHP) managed to cross the 10% threshold for parliamentary representation, with 19%.
The monstrously misnamed DLP of prime minister and political dinosaur Bulent Ecevit won just 1% of the vote (down from 23% in 1999). Ecevit and the leaders of ANAP, DYP and MHP all resigned.
In its first statements, the AKP regime expressed strong support for Turkey's goal of membership of the European Union (EU). It has played down its Islamic nature. Party leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan has promised to accept the economic guidelines laid down by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), but with "some negotiated changes" to soften social hardships and "safeguard national interests".
Turkey's Argentina-scale economic crisis boasts an external debt of US$100 billion (in 1999). Unofficial estimates put unemployment at 20%. The IMF's last $16 billion bailout has held off economic catastrophe, but its prescriptions have only worsened the situation for Turkey's poverty-stricken majority.
Cultural divide
The election was an overwhelming rejection of ruling-class attempts to force the poor to pay for the crisis via privatisation, mass sackings and deregulation. The capitalists of Turkey's western seaboard, who the defeated parties represent, continued to flaunt their "modern European" affluence as the misery of the country's majority has intensified.
Turkey's socioeconomic divide has partially developed into a cultural divide, due to the arrogance of the corrupt"secular" elite. As resentment has grown among the Anatolian peasantry and the millions of recent rural migrants in the big cities, many have turned to the Islamist movement.
In the 1920s, a nationalist revolution led by Kemal Attaturk forced the separation of church and state. Today, however, the fact that women working in government offices or attending schools and universities are banned from wearing a headscarf is not seen as progressive "secularism" but as military repression. As AKP deputy leader Abdullah Gul has noted: "It's not good that a Turkish girl who wears a scarf cannot go to university in Turkey, but she can do so in London, Paris, Bonn or Washington."
Erdogan was jailed a few years ago — and subsequently banned from standing for parliament in the November 3 election — for the "crime" of reading a Muslim poem in public, further discrediting official "secularism".
Many poor Turks see the Islamists as "cleaner" than their rivals. Even Erdogan's critics concede that when he mayor of Istanbul, his administration ran the city with a minimum of corruption. Erdogan's party runs social welfare programs for the poor, while other "Islamic" organisations provide stationery for school children, ran charity centres and provide free ambulances for pregnant women.
As such mild gestures seem radical in the context of Turkish politics, Erdogan was able to win support on these policies alone. During the election, he spoke of the need for running water in every home and lower fuel prices for farmers, but seldom mentioned religion.
Iraq war
On the threat of a US attack on Iraq, Erdogan said, "We do not want war, blood, tears and dead in our region". He noted that "on this issue there is no international coalition, even the American nation is not clear on it, whereas in Afghanistan a coalition was formed." However, he also indicated that Turkey would be "obliged by the United Nations' decisions" should the UN endorse the war. He has not made it clear whether Turkey would allow the US to use Turkish bases in the event of a unilateral US attack. Polls show 80% of Turks oppose a war with Iraq.
Turkey's powerful military command and its ruling-class political parties are nervous about a US attack on Iraq, not out of anti-imperialism but out of the fear that it may encourage Iraqi Kurds, and therefore also Turkey's oppressed Kurds, to rebel and set up a Kurdish state. However, the military is bound to buckle under as long as the US gives Ankara a free hand to intervene to crush the Kurds.
Under US auspices, Turkey's military is the only firm strategic ally of Israel in the Middle East. Turkey and Israel agreed in July to enhance their security relationship, jointly appealing to Washington to approve Ankara's purchase and possible co-production of the Arrow anti-tactical ballistic missile interceptor, developed by the US and recently deployed in Israel.
The AKP calls for "settlement of the conflict in Palestine" with no overt reference to Israel. There is unease among the US foreign policy elite that even a moderate Islamist-influenced party has gained office in such a strategic US ally, particularly on the eve of Bush's blitzkrieg against Iraq. Despite cautious congratulations from the US government, Barbara Slavin in the November 4 USA Today reported that privately "US officials are horrified."
However, the AKP "will not have much leeway" because "the [Turkish] military will be very vigilant", Seyfi Tashan, director of the Foreign Policy Institute in Ankara, told Associated Press on November 3. Soner Cagaptay, a Turkey expert at the Washington Institute for Near East policy, told AP that the US need not be too concerned, as "Turkish democracy has the luxury of a fail-safe option" of military intervention.
The traditional parties (except the fascist MHP) are offshoots of the decay of the Kemalist regime. This bourgeois-nationalist regime sought independent capitalist development while aligning itself with the West. It developed a powerful military apparatus which steered the "modernisation" of the economy. The military justifies its intervention in Turkish politics by calling itself the "guarantor" of the modern secular state against any revival of Islamist political influence.
Ruling class split
The Turkish military in the post-1945 era became a key prop of US Cold War strategy, situated as it was between Europe, the Soviet Union and the Middle East. The regime was lavished with US military aid — the largest amount after Israel and Egypt.
The military used its Kemalist past as ideological cover to justify its repressive rule, including the crushing of left opposition and the Kurdish minority. When various groups from the ex-Kemalist bureaucracy began to fight over the spoils, farcical "elections" were held without altering the fact that it was a regime with thousands of political prisoners and rampant extra-judicial killings.
Despite its alleged commitment to "secularism", in the 1970s and 1980s the military began bolstering a right-wing "Islamic" movement to fight alongside the fascist "Grey Wolves" of the MHP to counter a rising left and workers' movement. The biggest flowering of "Islamic" schools occurred in the first few years of the military junta of the early 1980s.
However, with the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the bloody crushing of the Turkish left, the divide between the "secular" military and the Islamists resurfaced. More than just ideology explains this. It is also a conflict over Turkey's direction: towards closer integration with Western imperialism, favoured by the military and its allied parties, or stronger links with its Muslim neighbours, advocated by the Islamists.
The rise of the Islamist current represents the growth of an economically and culturally distinct sector of Turkey's capitalist class, based in the central and eastern Anatolian regions. Resenting the power of the Kemalist ruling class based in the big cities and ports in the country's west, with its links to Europe, the "eastern" capitalists fear that a too rapid opening to competition by far stronger European companies in the EU will ruin them. They regard their economic links to the Muslim world to be of great importance.
In 1996, a coalition government was elected which included an Islamist party, the Welfare Party, led by Necmettin Erbekan, and the DYP, a right-wing ex-Kemalist party. Erbekan's first trips abroad were to Iran and Libya. His government set up the "Developing Eight Group" as a new Muslim economic bloc.
This led the Erbekan government into conflict with the virulently pro-US policy of the military, which threw the government out in 1997. The Welfare Party was banned and the military replaced the government with a bloc of right-wing ex-Kemalist parties, including the ANAP and Ecevit's DLP.
Ecevit's outfit is the party closest to the military throughout the last four decades (Ecevit was the leader who invaded Cyprus in 1974). Following 1998 elections, the DLP, the EU-oriented ANAP and the fascist MHP formed a new weird ruling coalition.
However, the military is now the loudest opponent of the democratic reforms — such as the abolition of the death penalty and the legalisation of some Kurdish language and cultural rights — demanded by the EU as conditions for Turkey's admittance.
The military is also not necessarily opposed to EU membership. However, it is determined to maintain its political power, including the right to ban parties, throw out elected governments and mercilessly crush the Kurds. Thus, it rejects any compromise with the democratic conditions for EU membership. The military also has its own major economic interests through the Organisation of Mutual Aid, which has hundreds of millions of dollars invested in much of Turkish industry, so it may be considered the third wing of the ruling class.
This issue split the incumbent coalition. The ANAP advocated reforms to gain EU membership, while the MHP became the main anti-EU force. The aging Ecevit wavered.
The victorious AKP has embraced the EU. Moreover, EU demands for democratic reform benefit the Islamists, the left and the Kurds. The military, with its "secularism" as the hallmark of its pro-Western orientation, is now the major bloc opposed to the EU, while the Islamists, who reject Kemalist "modernism", now speak strongly in favour of it and are in agreement with their ideological opposites among the secular western-Turkish establishment.
Having an eastern orientation does not rule out EU membership, all Turkish capitalists naturally want economic links with both Europe and the "East". The "moderation" of the AKP's "Islamism" represents an attempt to bridge the two wings of the elite. At the same time, a party with a more populist appeal to the masses is a necessity for all wings of the ruling class. The vanquished parties simply no longer had any authority with which to continue bludgeoning the people of Turkey into the kind of austerity demanded if the country is ever to join the EU.
The more pro-EU policy of the "eastern" AKP also dovetails with the growing divergence between the EU and Washington over Middle East policy. Franco-German opposition to the extremism of the Bush gang's Iraq and Palestine policies is partly derived from the European interest in normal economic links with their neighbours, including through Turkey. Bush's and Sharon's adventurism links maintenance of Western economic penetration with US military domination of the Middle East, and over Europe via NATO.
As the US needs a powerful Turkish military as a regional tool, the last thing it wants is EU-sponsored democratic changes that would dilute its power.
While Erdogan's "moderation" in relation to the EU, the IMF and a US attack on Iraq reflect the fact that the AKP is a conservative bourgeois party, the masses who elected his party see its crushing victory as a mandate for change. If the military moves against the AKP, such blatantly undemocratic action may provoke a popular reaction.
From Green Left Weekly, November 27, 2002.
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